He expressed some of his true feelings today.’
‘Brian also expressed his feelings about me and my genital odor. Congratulations on your progress.’ Elliot stepped into the room and sat beside the dollhouse in an overstuffed chair – the only piece of adult-size furniture in Kate’s office aside from her own desk and chair. Elliot was dark-haired, average in height, slightly over-average in weight and possessed a much, much higher than average IQ. As usual he was wearing wrinkled chinos, a baggy T-shirt and a clashing open-necked shirt on top. Putting his feet up on the toy box, he opened his lunch sack.
Kate sighed. She and Elliot usually had lunch together. But, today, Elliot had had the dreaded cafeteria duty and was just now, at nearly two thirty, getting a chance to eat. She delighted in his company but she was melancholy from her session with Brian. Elliot, fresh from the horror of the lunchroom, was blithely unaware of her mood as he pulled out several items and tore into a sandwich that smelled suspiciously like corned beef.
‘Brian is in Sharon’s class, isn’t he?’ Elliot asked too casually.
Kate nodded. ‘Poor kid. His mother dies and his teacher is the Wicked Witch of the Upper West Side.’ Kate had to smile. Neither she nor Elliot had much use for Sharon Jones, a truly lazy teacher and a deeply annoying woman.
‘So aside from a recently deceased mom, what’s bugging Brian?’ Elliot asked.
Kate felt too brittle for their usual badinage. ‘You have mustard on your chin,’ she told him, but as Elliot reached up to wipe it, the glob fell onto his shirt.
‘Oops,’ he said and dabbed ineffectually at his shirtfront with one of the hard paper towels from the school’s bathrooms. The yellow splotch looked particularly hideous on the green of his shirt. Watching Elliot eat, Kate often thought, was a spectator sport.
‘He believes that magic can bring his mother back,’ she sighed wistfully.
‘See? See what I mean? They’re all obsessed with witches and wizards. Damn that Harry Potter!’ Elliot said, then took another huge bite of the sandwich. ‘So what’s your prescription?’
‘I want him to give up the magic and get in touch with his anger and pain,’ Kate answered.
‘Oi vey!’ Elliot said with the best Yiddish accent a gay man from Indiana could ever manage. ‘When will you give up on this quest to get every little boy at Andrew Country Day in touch with his true feelings? And why discourage magic in his case? What else does the kid have?’
‘Oh, come on, Elliot! Because magic won’t work and he mustn’t think it’s his fault when it fails.’ She shook her head. ‘You of all people. A trained statistician. A man who could trade this job in, triple your salary and become chief actuary at any pension fund. You’re telling me to encourage magic?’
Elliot shrugged. ‘Haven’t you ever had magical things happen?’
Kate refused the bait. Elliot, raised in the Midwest and stoic to the bone, had told her ‘the unexamined life is the only one livable’. He often challenged her about the efficacy of psychology. Now, just to annoy her, he was going to take a perverse stand on magic. ‘If you think you’re going to start an argument today, Elliot,’ she warned him, ‘you’re out of your mind.’ Then, to annoy him – as well as for his own good – she added, ‘I didn’t think corned beef was good for your cholesterol.’
‘Oh, what’s a few hundred points one way or the other?’ he asked cheerfully, swallowing another mouthful.
‘You’ve got a death wish,’ Kate said.
‘Ooooh. Harsh words from a shrink.’ Elliot winced mockingly as he opened a Snapple.
‘Look, I’m leaving,’ she told him, gathering some notes from her desk and putting them into her file cabinet. If she left now she’d be able to do a bit of shopping before meeting her friend Bina. She took a lipstick and mirror out of her purse, dabbed the color over her mouth and smiled wide to make sure she didn’t have lipstick on her teeth. ‘I’ll see you for dinner.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘None of your bee’s wax.’
‘A secret? Come on. Tell! What if I threw a tantrum like Brian did?’ Elliot reached into the toy box at his feet. Then he hurled a stuffed bear in Kate’s direction. ‘Would you tell me then?’ The plush missile hit her squarely in the face. Elliot curled up in the chair, held his hands in front of his own face and started to beg rapidly. ‘It was an accident. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
‘I’ll show you sorry,’ Kate warned as she threw the bear back at Elliot, but missed.
‘You throw like a girl,’ Elliot taunted. Then he picked up another animal and threw it at Kate. ‘Duck!’ he called as he reached for yet another toy to throw. It was indeed a duck, yellow and fluffy.
‘Duck this, you math nerd,’ Kate almost shouted as she grabbed a fuzzy rabbit and pummeled Elliot’s head. It felt good to blow off some steam.
‘Abuse! Abuse!’ Elliot screamed in delight as he rolled off the chair to protect himself. ‘Teacher abuse! Teacher abuse!’
‘Shut up, you idiot!’ Kate told him and rushed to close the office door. She turned from it just in time to get a stuffed elephant right in the face. Stunned for only a moment, Kate grabbed the pachyderm and lunged at Elliot. ‘I’ll show you abuse, you sniveling cholesterol warehouse,’ she threatened as she fell on top of Elliot and beat him repeatedly with the toy.
Elliot fought back with both an inflatable flamingo and a stuffed dog. He might be gay, but he was no wussy. When he and Kate were both exhausted (and – sadly – the flamingo’s leg was punctured), they sat panting and laughing together in the big chair, Kate on top. The door opened.
‘Excuse me?’ Mr McKay asked, but despite his words he wasn’t the type to excuse anything. ‘I thought I heard a ruckus in here.’
Mr McKay, the principal of Andrew Country Day lower school, was a hypocrite, a social climber, a control freak and a very bad dresser. He also had a knack of using words no one else had used for several decades.
‘A ruckus?’ Elliot asked.
‘We were just testing out a new therapy,’ Kate extemporized. ‘Did it disturb you?’ she asked innocently.
‘Well, it was certainly loud,’ George McKay complained.
‘From the little I know of it, AAT – Airborne Animal Therapy – can frequently be noisy,’ Elliot said, po-faced, ‘although it’s having significant measurable success in schools for the gifted where it’s being pioneered. Of course,’ he added, ‘it might not be right for this setting.’ He nodded at Kate. ‘I’m not the expert,’ he said as if he were deferring to Kate’s professional judgment. She smothered a laugh with a cough.
‘We’ll put this off until after three o’clock, Mr McKay,’ she promised.
‘All right then,’ he said primly. He left as suddenly as he had arrived, shutting the door with a firm but controlled click. Kate and Elliot looked at one another, waited for a count of ten, then burst into giggles that they had to stifle.
‘AAT?’ Kate gurgled.
‘Hey, straight men love acronyms. Think of the army. He’ll be on the internet in less than ten minutes searching for Airborne Animal Therapy,’ Elliot predicted. He stood up and began collecting the stuffed animals. Kate got up to help him. The irony of the situation was that Elliot had helped Kate get hired and since then George McKay had told several teachers that he suspected them of having an affair. Ridiculous as that idea was, the sight of the two of them in the chair was not one to instill confidence in George McKay, who had frequently announced at teachers’ meetings that he ‘discouraged fraternizing among professional educational co-workers’.
When Kate and her ‘professional educational co-worker’ finished